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The gender ideology movement sort of feels out of the news cycle where I live, but remains very top of mind for me.
As I see it, the whole umbrella is actually multiple, almost unrelated strands, queerying category activists, social engineering progressives, AGPs, internet cults, all underpinned by unthinking legal activism and of course corporate profiteering. Did I mention an overtly political and enabling media environment bereft of any journalistic values?
I am fascinated by all these things but mainly I want to talk about the social mania aspect. I'm very interested in how smart people, who would inevitably class themselves as above-average in rationality and morality, are able to brush off child-safeguarding concerns, discarding the previous medical ethics consensus (first do no harm, evidence based medicine) in favour of ideas that barely existed even 15-20 years ago.
I have been looking into previous social manias such as the satanic panic and the child care workers given wrongful convictions and it's shocking how difficult it is to reverse the tide of mania once it's begun. Parents, police, the justice system, and media all fall into lockstep and condemn innocent people to terrible fates they and their families bear in almost total isolation, with only a few supporters able to parse the information in front of them and figure out what is going on.
I mean this is just human behaviour - we make movies about the Salem witch trials, we are modern people and have access to perspectives of humans across evolutionary time. Is it really true that people still don't know who we are, how we behave in herds?
I understand apathy, I understand things moving out of the news cycles, but I can't understand how people can maintain a neutral view on unnecessary surgeries on minors. When institutions such as medical bodies fail in their basic safeguarding responsibilities, suppressing dissent within their ranks, it is not hard to work out what is going on. How many manias does history need to present before people learn what we are?
A failure of courage I understand in any given context but the neutral middle doesn't even seem curious in private.
Can anybody enlighten me why people aren't more curious, why they're happy for children to be groomed into lifelong medicalisation, with their life choices pre-emptively narrowed before they even understand what consent means? The true-believers I understand, it's supposedly smart, moral people that aren't engaged that I'm confused about. Are they secretly true believers but just don't want to say?
Plain old cognitive dissonance?
If you think that minors are basically small people, and that people should largely be allowed to do things that they personally expect will make them fulfilled, it's pretty easy to keep a neutral view. Something like "I have no desire to do this to myself, but neither to I have a moral claim to prevent them from doing it to themselves". To be honest, this is pretty much where I fall on the issue. I am somewhat uncomfortable with the speed with which this went from rare to common, as it leaves people without solid information on how well it's likely to go in the marginal case rather than the average-as-of-decades ago. Still, I can't think of any interventions where the benefit of that intervention is worth the costs and the precedents it sets.
Empirically, people do not learn from history, only from things that they personally have seen, and so every group in every generation has to learn that lesson for themselves.
What's wrong with "ban until they're 18"? What precedent is it setting? It's not like we're living in an ancap utopia, the establishment even cracked down on the use of prescribed ivermectin.
I would prefer that we live in an Ancap Utopia actually, with no arbitrary age gating at all.
In principle, I see nothing wrong with anybody of any age changing their sex, it's just that medical science today is unable to cash the cheques that trans activitists write in that regard. No amount of modern surgery or hormones will make you more than a pale facsimile of of the opposite sex, but I don't expect that to last indefinitely, and I dislike age gating anyway.
Well, there's the rub. If you talk to the pioneers of gender medicine they were pretty explicit that this is just for people feeling massive amounts of distress, that no matter what you do, it will only be a facsimile, that it has serious health consequences, but overall it might be worth it if the distress is so great.
The whole point of age gating is that with kids, all this goes out the window. They don't understand the facsimile thing, and you try explaining the side effects to them, they shrug them off as it all blurs into these quickly-spoken disclaimers at the end of medicine ads.
Yes, I also wish that we were honest about this not ending with transgenderism, so people screaming at me for opposing it can know what they're signing up for. Right now anyone pointing out the transhumanism connection gets treated as a conspiracy theorist.
You're dealing with exceptionally stupid kids if they can't look at existing examples of MTF or even FTM trans people and thinking "oh shit I don't want to turn out like that". They do so despite the evidence to the contrary, because of social indoctrination, but in that regard they're not qualitatively different from adults who transition, who usually end up even more fucked at least in terms of ability to pass if not further health issues.
I wish. Despite surface similarities, the modal transgender activist has little in common with transhumanists, especially in terms of ontology and goals. You might as well lump us in with body builders because we want to improve on the body we were born with, or say Communists and Ancaps are the same because they both seek the dissolution of a capitalist state. I don't even see them as allies of convenience, they're already fucking inconvenient to say the least..
No, because their information environment is largely controlled by adults who will be feeding them the opposite. Sure, nowadays, it's likely they can break out to some degree, but what would you call a child who believed stuff from randos on the Internet over their teachers?
Depends on what kind of randos. I might potentially call him a promising young man. If the kid is spending his time online absorbing "aliens built the pyramids"-type stuff then maybe a teacher would be better. But if the kid is reading a variety of sources, even if he's just reading Wikipedia, then I'd say that has a high chance of being better for his education than the average teacher.
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